By: KENNETH MAXWELL

Folha de São Paulo - Op-ed section - page A2   

It was another good Tuesday for Barack Obama and a very bad week for Hillary Clinton. Senator Obama swept to victory in the States of Virginia and Maryland, and the District of Columbia and has now pulled ahead in the race for the democratic nomination. Against the historical odds, a Black American is now a leading contender for the American presidency. Senator Obama has based his whole campaign on one basic and consistent assumption. As he put it himself: "I believe America is ready." Ready, that is, to elect a black president. But is it? There is an unspoken concern about Obama. Or at least it was unspoken until the 88 year novelist Doris Lessing, last year's Nobel prize in literature, said it out loud last week: "He would probably not last long, a black man in the position of president. They would kill him." she told a Swedish newspaper. It is a concern widely shared among African Americans.

Here, the racial history of America is less at issue than is America's history of political violence and the ubiquity of firearms. Since 1865 there have been nine assassinations or attempted assassinations of American presidents. Four were successful: Presidents Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley and Kennedy. Five were unsuccessfully: Presidents Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, Truman, Ford and Reagan. Black leaders who have been attacked include Martin Luther King and Malcolm X who were killed, and Vernon Jordan who survived.

Assassination attempts during presidential campaigns include Robert Kennedy who died, and George Wallace who survived but was paralyzed below the waist.

But the real danger in all these cases has not been conspiracy; not in the threat posed by the unidentified "they" of Doris Lessing's warning; but rather from the obsessed individual assassin who is almost impossible to identify in advance, or to stop at the time he or she strikes. The sad truth is that conspiracies are easier to detect than is the lone determined gun man set on making history. America has produced and continues to produce many such troubled individuals. So Doris Lessing is right to say what she said. No one who knows America should underestimate the risk.

KENNETH MAXWELL is a weekly op-ed columnist (every Thursday) for Folha de São Paulo, Brazil's leading newspaper.